The system he designed required interviewers to measure young men
on six dimensions in a specific order, and only then use their
intuition to imagine what kind of soldiers the men would make.

Sixty years later, the system is still in place — a testament to
the power of structured interviews in predicting performance on
the job.

Yet Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for
his pioneering work in the field of behavioral economics, says
there's a limit to our ability to make these kinds of judgments.

In an interview with Dan Pink at the Wharton People
Analytics Conference on April 7, Kahneman explained that some
portion of people's job performance is unpredictable — and we'll
probably never be able to pick the perfect candidate for every
position.

He cited Google as an example of a company that uses
structured interviews and takes pains to make hiring
decisions that are as accurate as possible. For example, Google
has multiple people evaluate each candidate, so as to reduce the
influence of one person's faulty judgment.

"I don’t feel that psychologists have much to tell Google that it
doesn’t know," he said.

At some point, he added, "the problem is not that we're poor at
predicting; the problem may be that [performance is]
unpredictable."

"There are chaotic interactions between the characteristics of
the individual and the events that happen to them on the job that
change them and that change the way they are viewed and treated
by other people."

There is no way, he said, that by further testing the individual
you can achieve greater accuracy.

In other words, organizations should use the most advanced
systems they can — but should also accept that human behavior
will never be 100% knowable.

In terms of guessing how people will perform on the job, he said,
"whether we can do radically better than we are doing now, I’m
quite skeptical."